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The article discusses the "Beyond the Breach" report released by "Mandiant M-Trends" on April 10, 2014, which offers insight into the current status of the Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT1) and how it has changed since 2013. It examines some of the trends in various industries that are being attacked which include the financial services, media and entertainment industries.

The article discusses the highlights of the RSA Conference held on February 24 to 28, 2014 at the Moscone Center in California. The conference focused on RSA Security's involvement with the National Security Agency (NSA), a topic addressed by Art Coviello, executive chairman of RSA. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were also represented in the conference.

The article previews the Firefox 29 Aurora web browser from Mozilla.

The article discusses Linux Foundation's collaboration projects spanning the spectrum of computing activities from virtualization to soft-ware-defined networking (SDN).

A slide show is presented that highlights some trends from the Hewlett-Packard 2013 Cyber Risk Report.

The article offers information on Mageia Linux Desktop distribution version 4.0 software.

The article discusses major cyber security trends of 2013 as reported by security firm Crowdstrike in its 2013 Global Threat Report, by technology vendor Cisco in its 2014 Annual Security Report, and by information security firm Trustwave. The trends include the pervasiveness of spam e-mail, the entry of most malware via the Web, and Android being the leading target of mobile malware. The top adversary target and source countries are also mentioned. The top themes for spam messages are listed.

The article presents information on the studies from security vendors Kaspersky Lab Inc. and Sophos Ltd. which focus on the security events in 2013 and predict the trend for 2014. The studies highlight the continued risk from botnets including ZeroAccess botnet that was recently disrupted by U.S. lawmakers and Microsoft Corp. The use of exploit kits by hackers, and continued increase in mobile malware, were also discussed.

The article focuses on the trend of changing names by technology vendors in 2013. It focuses on the practice of replacing the company's name with one of its brand names when it becomes synonymous with company name. It discusses how increasing popularity of an individual product brand forces companies to consider rebranding and renaming entire companies. It refers to smartphone pioneer Research In Motion Ltd., which adopted the name of its core product platform BlackBerry as its company name.

The article evaluates the Linux Mint 16 open-source operating system for desktop computers.

The article offers information on the openSUSE 13.1 Linux distribution open source software.

The article discusses highlights on the series of innovations for Amazon Web Services (AWS) detailed at Amazon's re: Invent conference held in November 2013. The CloudTrail service that logs API calls, the AppStream interactive cloud-powered streaming service, and the addition of global secondary indexes in its DynamoDB NoSQL database are mentioned. Announcements such as the expansion of 30 new Test Drive applications options and the support for the open-source PostgreSQL database are cited.

The article discusses the highlights of the semiannual Design Summit held by the open-source OpenStack Foundation in Hong Kong, China on November 5-8, 2013. The event discussed topics related to the cloud and emphasized the global nature of the Open Stack cloud platform and the high levels of interest, participation, and deployment of the platform in China. Daniel Lai, government chief information officer of Hong Kong, commented on OpenStack and its global nature.

Several charts are presented that provide information on the open-source OpenStack cloud technology as of November 2013 including its top 10 applications or workloads, the most deployed host operating systems for OpenStack and the top storage choices for OpenStack.

The article offers information on the 2012 Blue Hat security challenge of Microsoft Corp. in which the prizes total $260,000. It mentions that the goal of Blue Hat is to motivate security researchers to develop a defensive technology for Windows. It notes that the winners such as researcher Vasilis, Ivan Frantic, and Jared DeMott aim at return-oriented programming (ROP) which is a key exploitation technique utilized in many attacks.

The article focuses on a report released at the Black Hat conference which states that it would be more difficult for hackers to exploit the heap memory manager of Windows 8 operating system from software company Microsoft Corp. Senior security researcher Chris Valasek at Coverty says that memory heap is one critical component of Windows operating system. It states that Microsoft engineers has added a new prerequisites to Windows 8's heap memory manager that makes it difficult to exploit.

The article focuses on the demonstration of security researcher Rafael Dominguez Vega and hacker Nils at the Black Hat security conference showing vulnerabilities in the security system of credit card payment terminals. It states that Nils put different malicious payment card with pictures of cartoon characters such as Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh to acquire necessary data from the terminals. In addition, Vega noted that payment terminals are small computers that has vulnerabilities.

The article relates a speech by Shawn Henry, former executive director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In his speech, Henry warned that the nation is at war with cyber-hackers. He discusses the similarities between the physical and cyber-world crimes. He also asked hackers to join the government to fight cyber-security threats that endanger the computer security and infrastructure of the nation.